By Kristin Korolowicz, Bass Museum of Art

This past December marked the first edition of the Bass Museum’s public art program initiative Temporary Contemporary. Organized in collaboration with Art Basel Miami Beach and curator Christine Y. Kim, the outdoor exhibition featured a diverse range of practices from internationally renowned and emerging artists. Our selections included not only static sculptures, but also conceptual, performative and temporal gestures. One such highlight was Glenn Kaino’s “Levitating the Fair”….

For the project, Los Angeles-based artist Glenn Kaino gathered hundreds of volunteers to stage an unprecedented durational performance that took place in Collins Park. Volunteers were asked to help lift a 20 x 20 feet sculptural platform referencing the iconic attractions of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Invoking the carnivalesque origins of the fair, the work points toward the emancipatory possibilities that emerge from the celebratory, while still echoing the grotesque relationship between bodies and conspicuous consumption. It examines and complicates how Art Basel Miami Beach and other art fairs operate in the current landscape of cultural production as both a sustaining force and problematic platform of artistic output. An endurance performance and visualization of collective labor, Kaino’s project tests our physical investment and personal commitment to the realization of creative moments.